I doubt that any one writing today in this country is closer in understanding and treatment of its pioneer life than Conrad Richter. He has not only given the frontier his scholarly attention and sympathetic interpretation, but he has done what is even more important; he has recreated the frontier and the early development of the nation in terms of atmosphere, character and even speech. He has that gift—the first and most important in a novelist—of creating for the reader a world as real as the one in which he lives, a world which the reader enters on reading the first page and in which he remains until the last.

"The Fields" is actually a sequel to an earlier novel, one of the best on early American life, called "The Trees."… The tale centered largely about the growth and development of a girl-child called Sayward.

"The Fields" continues the life of Sayward after her strange marriage to the "educated" New Englander Portius, through the raising of their family of eight children. But it is much more than that; it is also the tale of the slow battle and eventual victory over the Trees….

The characters, all save perhaps the complicated husband Portius, are simple enough people, living against a background of primitive beauty. The story is told with a feeling of poetry and the picturesque turn of language which characterized the speech of the frontier…. The speech has not the confusing effect which dialect speech sometimes has in a novel; instead it has the strength of eighteenth-century expressions and turns of speech, possessed both of vigor and of vividness.

Sayward, the heroine, is the portrait of a simple, eternal woman dominating in an instinctive way a husband who is far more educated and subtle than herself. The children are real children, each with his own personality….

"The Fields" is the kind of book which Americans of these times should read. In it they will be able to find a real sense of values, a fundamental strength. It is a down-to-earth book which is at the same time almost mystical in its appreciation of nature and of those forces from which we have derived so much of our strength in the past. Technically the book is simply but curiously constructed of a chain of incidents, each one of which illumines the characters and background and creates a satisfying unity. Nor has "The Fields" any of the disadvantages that sometimes afflict a sequel.